


Here's Your Future

by levendis



Series: Prompt Fics [95]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Fluff and Angst, One Night Stands, Pre-Slash, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-05
Updated: 2016-10-05
Packaged: 2018-08-19 16:06:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8216030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: You can’t run on adrenaline forever.





	

**Author's Note:**

> for anon, who prompted: clara/me post-hell bent. waaaaaaaay post. the show's always telling us two immortals shouldn't travel alone. especially reckless immortals who think they're right.

The shadow swallows a planet. Clara and Me save as many of the inhabitants as they can. Not all, not nearly enough. Only so many ships available, only so much time.

 _We have a time machine,_ Clara says, as the crowded TARDIS vanishes in the wake of the implosion. _So let’s go back._

It works the first time, just about. Reality, already shaky, unraveling as they go back and land in view of their old selves; a hinge-point already cracking when they set down a second time splits apart entirely on the third time. The TARDIS cries out and spins off and the planet, the shadow, the sun, and two other planets are caught up in the bubble wrapped around the hole in the world.

Bad enough as it is, it could have been worse. Two decisions, neither of them one you’d want to make. Let people die, or tempt the end of the universe. So. The first one, then. Necessarily.  


Clara hides in her room for the better part of a week and finally emerges as a colder, more distant version of herself.

  


* * *

The boy is young, impossibly so. Mid-twenties, thereabouts. Big ears and shaggy hair and wide green eyes. A shapeless grey jumpsuit - mechanic? Janitor? One of those, or similar. He buys Clara a drink and laughs at her jokes and she decides, on the spur of the moment, to take him back to the TARDIS.

He’s maybe wondering why there’s a diner on a space station - maybe struggling through vague memories of history lessons for the word ‘diner’, for any sort of context. She presses him up against the wall, against the painting of Elvis Presley, and wraps her hands around his wrists. His pulse thunders in her head. Maybe he notices he’s feeling no pulse in return, maybe not; either way, he’s just a bit afraid of her, even as he sinks down to his knees.

This boy’s hands on her hips, the smell of burnt coffee, the vortex howling just beyond the skin of the ship. At least she can still come.

  


* * *

“There’s a module to intercept distress signals, apparently.” Me says this in a vague, disaffected way, as if she hasn’t spent the better part of the past however-long trying to get it to work. She casually flips a lever, hits a sequence of buttons, and a small, gleaming sphere pops out of the TARDIS console. It starts relaying frequencies. Static, gibberish, the odd string of words the ship can latch onto.

“Good idea,” Clara says. She runs her hand over the sphere, spins it in its casing. Flipping along the dial. “Go where the action is.”

Me just stares, and assumes the standard braced stance as Clara sends them hurtling off.  


  


* * *

The fire is burning around them and Clara is bored. It’s an uncomfortable realization, so she ignores it. Until the fire’s out, the crisis averted, the day neatly and gracefully saved.

“I warned you,” Me says. Trying to watch Clara out of the corner of her eye without being noticed. She sends the distress-signal module back into the depths of the ship, the surface of the console sealing over the hole left behind. “You can’t run on adrenaline forever. You need to find - more noble pursuits.”

“Like you? And your ‘noble pursuits’?” There are tears pricking at Clara’s eyes and she doesn’t even know why. Surely she’d cried herself out over that particular wound years ago.

Years, decades. Has it been centuries, yet?

“Life is a process,” Me says tightly. She’s probably forgotten, but her journals remind her. “We keep learning. Keep evolving. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

Doesn’t need to be a point, Clara thinks. Human life has no point, not really. Just get born and live a bit and then die. So, what, she’s got a bit more time than the average person - this holds her to a higher standard? Besides.

“Yeah, well. I’ve got no life to worry about.” She bites her lip and tries to smile and then storms off, hoping her bedroom is where she left it.

  


* * *

It’s not. She finds a hammock stretched haphazardly between two thick, almost pulsating cables. Down deep below decks, metaphorically speaking. She tries twice to get into it before giving up and sitting down on the floor. Knees drawn up to her chin. She can hear the vortex screaming, below the thin membrane that the ship is.  


And she can hear Me approaching from two corridors away. That measured click-clack of her sensible heels, coming closer and closer.  


“You’re not dead yet,” Me says plainly. Like there’d been no interruption in their conversation. She straightens the hammock and lies down in it easily.

Clara watches the outline of her sway gently. The ship doesn’t really move, but it’s got a sense of poetry.

“You could be, if you wanted to. Nothing’s keeping you from the trap street.”

Clara snorts. “Right. Just hurry on home to my doom.”

No response. Time static around them. One of them will have to make the first move, here.  


“What keeps you alive?” It’s a bit more on-the-nose than she’d wanted, but those are the words she finds coming out of her mouth.

Me laughs, near-silently. “Cowardice. Even after all this time, I’m still afraid to die.”

“There must be more than that, surely.”

“And if there’s not?” The hammock gone still.

Clara’s close enough she could reach out and touch Me. She doesn’t. “There has to be. Otherwise…”

“Otherwise life is pointless and simply a way of delaying the inevitable. Yes, I know.”

“So.”

“So there’s more than that.” Me sighs. “Of course there is. And one day you’ll find it. Something - someone - that surprises you. Makes you care again. And then you’ll remember why you haven’t shot yourself in the head yet.”

“Thanks for the pep talk.” She does reach out then, for a light punch against Me’s side. The hammock swings away.

“Anytime. I hope you’re not going to sleep on the floor, undead or not you still have a body and I’m not interested in tiptoeing around you tomorrow when you’re all sore and belligerent.”

“I’m never belligerent.” Clara scrambles up just in time to catch the tail-end of Me’s eye-roll.

She’s always so very careful about herself, Me. Always compact and contained. Even in a ridiculous hammock in the middle of Service Corridor 17-B. Staring straight up at the ceiling, arms crossed over her chest.

“I think I’ll try again to find my bedroom,” Clara says. “Have a good night, then. Sleep tight.”

“Time has no meaning in the vortex,” Me says. And then shouting, as Clara makes her way down the hall: “It’s an artificial construct!”

Clara smiles, something turning over inside her. “See you in the morning,” she calls out, not looking back.


End file.
